a. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to computerized lists and specifically to traversing computerized lists in different orders.
b. Description of the Background
Lists of various sorts are commonplace within computer systems. For example, in input-output operations, requests for information, and the responses for the information may come in the form of lists. The lists may be in sequential order as determined by the sequence that various sectors of a disk were read. The list of information off of the disk may not be in the proper order for the intended request. In such a case, the list would need to be resorted to match the intended recipient.
The conventional method of searching a list is sequential. This involves traversing the list to locate a specific item in the list. When a second item or record is needed, the searching may resume from the top of the list. The conventional method is time consuming and may require many computational cycles to find the necessary items in the proper sequence.
Lists may be sorted so that the items may be accessed sequentially. Once the list is sorted into a particular sequence, the individual items may be accessed in order very quickly. However, there is substantial overhead in the reordering of the items into the desired order. In some cases, there is a need for the list to be presented in more than one order. In such a case, the list may have to be resorted, using more computational cycles.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a system and method for quickly traversing a sequential list in a second sequence. It would be further advantageous if the list could be quickly traversed in different sequences without resorting the list each time.